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Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

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Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#41

Post by lux »

cma wrote: post #25
potatolicious wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto, I was one of the DK1 backers so got the CV1 for free. I haven't used it much past the first week - only to demo to friends and such, really. I have some disillusionment about it also - it seems like Valve VR/Vive is getting a lot more dev support. Having tried the Vive also, I think delaying the Oculus motion controllers was a critical error. It turns out the motion controllers really open up a lot of use case…

I also got CV1 for free from being a Kickstarter. Having a Vive, the Oculus CV1 is just a paperweight right now. Even when Touch finally comes out, it has been under so much secrecy and so many NDAs that I'm thinking it might have significant issues.

Not sure how much I'm allowed to say, but I've been working with both controllers for a while and honestly really prefer Touch over Vive's controllers. They have way more expressiveness, which means we're often running into things we want to do with Touch that don't easily translate to Vive's trigger/squeeze/thumb combo. A basic example, you can do rock paper scissors with Touch. Not perfectly since you still have a controller in your hand, but it totally works.

It's a huge plus for Vive that it has motion controllers on launch, but if Touch comes out by end of 2016, half a year's difference isn't much time in the grand scheme of VR and I bet most of the Vive exclusives will be cross-platform then too.

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#42

Post by monk_e_boy »

the_rosentotter wrote: post #33
GauntletWizard wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have both. The Vive gets way more use, for one simple reason. Room scale is the future of VR. Some of the Oculus games are fantastic uses of the technology. Lucky's Tale has the camera on a rail based on where your character is, and EVE: Valkyrie has great mechanics for seated VR. But both of them feel like you're playing a game, albeit an immersive one, whereas room-scale vive games feel like I'm interacting with…

I am sceptical about this. People like to sit down for their entertainment, that is unlikely to change. Turning, swerving, swiveling, sure, but I bet most would quickly get fed up with having to get on their feet and move around in order to play their games.

I thought that about the Wii, but me and my lads still stand to play that. The games are a bit crap, so we only play for an hour or so, but standing to play isn't an issue for us (much to my surprise)

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#43

Post by AlexandrB »

NKCSS wrote: post #31
istorical wrote: post #28

The discussion around Vive vs Rift and Valve vs Oculus is getting more and more emotionally clouded and "good guys vs bad guys" with each passing week. People are letting their own frustration around Oculus' poorly managed launch and non-existent PR affect their perspective on the situation. The fact is that although Oculus is adopting somewhat of a walled garden approach, people entirely overlook that Valve maintain…

But Valve does so by providing a good platform. You have Origin, which is used mostly because of exclusive titles; most people I know would love to ditch origin for Steam. Value also doesn't have the same approach as Occulus; where Occulus tries to be the iOS Appstore (others not allowed), Valve never had that approach.

I would love to ditch both Origin and Valve for GoG which feels like everything I want out of digital distribution for games. GoG also has a more usable desktop app than Steam which suffers from a very overstuffed UI (not unlike iTunes).

Although Steam unquestionably dominates AAA game distribution, GoG's selection is great for the kinds of games I'm most interested in these days.

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#44

Post by monk_e_boy »

thearn4 wrote: post #9
jc4p wrote: post #5

I have an Oculus CV1, I had the DK2, and I've been making VR side-projects using their SDK for a couple years now. I'm really disillusioned about Oculus as a platform, though. I didn't even consider buying the HTC Vive because I've been riding the Oculus train for a while and had faith in them as the future of VR, but come on. I really wish I could know how Carmack feels about this. Sidenote: for what it's worth, I h…

> I really wish I could know how Carmack feels about this. That's a really good point - has he spoken at all about the direction of Oculus & HMD VR in general since the Rift was released?

The champion of mods. The champion of being as open as you can (while making money.) He lectures, he helps, he's open and honest.

I'm sure he is disappointed in where facebook+rift is heading.

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#45

Post by dave2000 »

highCs wrote: post #39

Got a bunch of real questions: do you know if VR is growing? Does people like the experience? How long are the user sessions?

Hey, come on, 3D was huge and the glasses you have to wear for this don't make you look as silly and are totally not going to give you headaches or make you sick, plus there'll be even more content for this, and because of the standards you can just buy any hardware and choose from thousands of great, great games.

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#46

Post by nilkn »

istorical wrote: post #28

The discussion around Vive vs Rift and Valve vs Oculus is getting more and more emotionally clouded and "good guys vs bad guys" with each passing week. People are letting their own frustration around Oculus' poorly managed launch and non-existent PR affect their perspective on the situation. The fact is that although Oculus is adopting somewhat of a walled garden approach, people entirely overlook that Valve maintain…

Maybe I'm not as aware of all the details as others, but it seems to me that Valve has maintained their position by creating an incredible platform and collection of products (Steam itself, Steam Link, the Steam Controller, etc.), not by engaging in anti-consumer practices. For instance, SteamVR has full support for the Rift. The Chaperone features will even work with the Rift.

More than that, though, I see very few examples of people being upset about the existence of the Oculus Store. People are upset about hardware exclusivity. Hence...

> Further, Oculus doesn't make any money on hardware right now, what can a person expect them to do?

I'd expect them to act in such a way as to maximize software sales, which means avoiding hardware exclusivity at all costs.

Again, I and most others don't really have a problem with Oculus creating their own store. Sure, it's a bit annoying, but we understand they can't really survive by letting Valve profit off software sales of games they've funded. None of this justifies hardware exclusivity though.

This leaves open the question of why they are in fact pursuing hardware exclusivity. I don't have a good answer to that and I'm not sure anyone outside of Oculus does. If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that they must have thought that their content was just flat-out better than anything available for the Vive so that it was strong enough to drive both software and hardware sales. Unfortunately, I suspect they were wrong. Their approach backfired and developer support is centering around the Vive now.

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#47

Post by api »

ohitsdom wrote: post #8

Really cool tech, but kind of a depressing start to this young industry. I feel like desktop apps are making huge strides in being cross-platform, both in attention from developers and the lower development effort required thanks to a myriad of software platforms and tools. It's just sad to see games still clinging to "exclusives" as if that's a positive thing.

Today's Internet industry is all about vertical lock-in, app store lock-down, and surveillance (customer is product), so an "eyeball grab" and "platform grab" for VR is to be expected.

This is particularly true when we're talking about a company where this is their entire business model.

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#48

Post by the_rosentotter »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #42
the_rosentotter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sceptical about this. People like to sit down for their entertainment, that is unlikely to change. Turning, swerving, swiveling, sure, but I bet most would quickly get fed up with having to get on their feet and move around in order to play their games.

I thought that about the Wii, but me and my lads still stand to play that. The games are a bit crap, so we only play for an hour or so, but standing to play isn't an issue for us (much to my surprise)

The Wii may actually be a case in point, since it never really got that much consumer uptake, and no other platform has picked up the mantle with physically active games.

As with the Vive, it seemed like the future at the time, the concept games were a lot of fun, and it scared competing platforms to rush out imitating products (Xbox Kinect, PS Move). But neither have ultimately had much adoption.

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#49

Post by shmerl »

What a shame. Rift started as a crowdfunded open project and ended up as a disgusting lock-in.

>Frequently secured through digital rights management (DRM ) technology, this functionality is typically standard for digital download stores.

Not really. There are enough DRM-free ones. I don't care about games that are released through some exclusive DRM-infested stores, but what's more worrying is that hardware itself is probably tied to those stores. I.e. can you use Rift with games for example released through GOG?

In this sense Vive isn't better now too, since it requires SteamVR (because no one else implemented OpenVR so far).

Re: Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus

#50

Post by colejohnson66 »

serge2k wrote: post #14
some-guy wrote: post #6

Oculus / Vive / PSVR are all "consoles" in a way, and that as competition becomes more and more fierce, profitability on hardware will go down over time. By staying a closed platform, if Oculus can deliver on their hardware while selling software on their platform. What's different about consoles though is that, at least in Oculus and Vive's case, the software looks to be fairly compatible with one another (hack-bloc…

> By staying a closed platform, if Oculus can deliver on their hardware while selling software on their platform. Hopefully they will just go out of business instead. No more walled garden bullshit, this is a VR peripheral. It doesn't need an app store attached.

Why does it need DRM? Can you imagine if you bought a monitor and it turned out you could only run specific programs and could only use approved peripherals?

"Oh, you can't run Google Chome, but we have an amazing equivalent: Oculus Explorer! We're also gonna monitor your mouse movements for the purpose of improving your customer experience. In addition, to ensure a consistent UX, you can only use Oculus approved mice and keyboards!"

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